Chapter 17-Industrial America:Corporations And Conflicts 1877-1911

Question 0

The gold rush in which state brought thousands of Chinese to the United States in the 1840s?

Answer 0

California

→ The California gold rush brought thousands of Chinese to the United States in the 1850s.

Question 1

What were traveling salesmen called in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 1

Drummers
→ “Drummers” became a familiar sight on city streets and even in remote country stores as early as the 1870s. Riding the rail networks from town to town, these “drummers” introduced merchants to new products, offered incentives, and suggested sales displays.

Question 2

Participants in which movement were arrested in the aftermath of the Haymarket Square bombing in 1886?

Answer 2

Anarchists
→ Anarchists organized a protest at Haymarket that ended in violence and death when police moved to break it up and someone threw a bomb. Anarchists were blamed (the evidence against the individuals who were charged was extremely weak), but the event set off an antiunion and antiradical hysteria that allowed the relatively conservative American Federation of Labor to take leadership of the American labor movement and weakened alternatives such as the Knights of Labor.

Question 3

What was the nature of the new legal form called the trust created in 1882 by John D. Rockefeller’s lawyers?

Answer 3

To use a board to manage an assemblage of corporations as a single entity
→ Rockefeller’s lawyers created the trust in order to make it possible for a board of trustees to manage a group of corporations as a single entity.

Question 4

What was the nature of the new legal form called the trust created in 1882 by John D. Rockefeller’s lawyers?

Answer 4

To use a board to manage an assemblage of corporations as a single entity
→ Rockefeller’s lawyers created the trust in order to make it possible for a board of trustees to manage a group of corporations as a single entity.

Question 5

After the Civil War, the United States signed the Burlingame Treaty with which country to control emigration from that country?

Answer 5

China
→ After the Civil War, the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China opened the way for increasing numbers of Chinese to emigrate to the United States.

Question 6

What issue sparked workers to stage the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?

Answer 6

The issuance of steep wage cuts
→ The depression that had begun in 1873 deeply cut into the revenues of railroad companies, which responded by trying to restrict labor costs by imposing significant wage cuts.

Question 7

What major event of the 1870s resulted in strong anti-Chinese sentiment on the Pacific coast?

Answer 7

Economic recession
→ During the depression of the 1870s, hostility was especially extreme in the Pacific coast states, where the majority of Asian immigrants lived. An anti-Chinese movement formed, particularly in California, which produced major violence against the Chinese and a political policy of exclusion through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Question 8

What ideal did the Greenback movement of the 1870s and 1880s advocate?

Answer 8

What ideal did the Greenback movement of the 1870s and 1880s advocate?

Question 9

Why did industrialists of the late 1800s like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie come to be called “robber barons” in the 1930s?

Answer 9

Their business-building activities were viewed more harshly than before.
→ During the Great Depression, and during other periods of economic crisis, many people viewed industrialists quite harshly. A historian coined the term “robber barons” to describe this group at the time, and it is still in use today.

Question 10

Samuel Gompers built his career as president of which of the following labor organizations?

Answer 10

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The American Federation of Labor
→ In late 1886, having failed to persuade the Knights of Labor to reform, the national trade unions formed the American Federation of Labor, with Samuel Gompers, a former head of the Cigar Makers Union, as president.

Question 11

John D. Rockefeller pioneered what business strategy?

Answer 11

Horizontal integration
→ Rockefeller pioneered the strategy that became known as horizontal integration. He pressured competitors through predatory pricing, but when he had driven them to failure, he invited rivals to merge their companies into his conglomerate. Most accepted the offer, often because they had no choice.

Question 12

What did the practice of having “paper sons” allow immigrants in the late nineteenth century to do?

Answer 12

Evade restrictions on Chinese immigration
→ Some would-be immigrants, known as paper sons, relied on Chinese residents in the United States, who generated documents falsely claiming the newcomers as American-born children.

Question 13

Why did members of the Farmers’ Alliance form cooperatives in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 13

To better their economic position
→ Alliance leaders pinned their initial hopes on cooperative stores and exchanges that would circumvent middlemen. Cooperatives gathered farmers’ orders and bought in bulk at wholesale prices, passing the savings along.

Question 14

Which of these new policies was a typical innovation of department stores and not other retail businesses in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 14

Large display windows
→ Innovations such as large display windows or elaborate Christmas decorations made shopping in urban department stores an experience and a new form of leisure, rather than simply a more convenient form of buying consumer goods.

Question 15

Which immigrant group sought to escape religious repression in addition to the hope of finding economic opportunity?

Answer 15

Jews
→ From 1880 to 1920, more than 3 million poverty-stricken Jews arrived from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other parts of Eastern Europe, transforming the Jewish presence in the United States.

Question 16

What was one reason that the cooperatives of the Farmers’ Alliances failed in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 16

Lack of funds
→ The Texas Alliance established a huge cooperative enterprise to market cotton and provide farmers with cheap loans. When cotton prices fell further in 1891, however, the Texas exchange failed. Other cooperatives also suffered from chronic underfunding and lack of credit, and they faced hostility from merchants and lenders they tried to circumvent.

Question 17

What type of mills emerged to become large-scale employers in the Carolinas and Georgia by 1900?

Answer 17

Textile
→ By 1900, new textile mills had spread across Georgia and the Carolinas, relying upon child labor to create a low-wage industrial sector.

Question 18

What was the ethnic background of most American Jews before the 1880s?

Answer 18

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German
→ The ethnic background of most American Jews before the 1880s was German.

Question 19

Which of the following would have been an unlikely reform cause for the urban Knights of Labor in the nineteenth century?

Answer 19

Cuts on federal income taxes
→ There was no federal income tax in the nineteenth century. Seeking to limit the aggregation of wealth, the Knights of Labor sought the creation of a federal tax on the nation’s highest incomes.

Question 20

What characteristic of the railroad industry made it an originator for innovative forms of corporate organization in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 20

Its decentralized nature required more elaborate organizational structures.
→ Supervising a 500-mile-long line was impossible for one manager at one station. To avoid delays, crashes, and loss of business, railroad executives gradually expanded corporate management to departmentalized operations by function in which they established clear lines of communication and in which cost accounting became perfected.

Question 21

After 1892, most European immigrants to the United States were routed through what location?

Answer 21

Ellis Island
→ An enormous receiving station, Ellis Island received millions of immigrants after 1892 when the station opened to regulate immigration to the United States.

Question 22

Which issue would Greenbackers have been unwilling to support in the 1870s and 1880s?

Answer 22

Deregulate industries
→ Greenbackers supported increasing the regulations governing insurance companies, utility companies, railroads, and other big businesses. Doing so, they believed, would protect workers and farmers against predatory practices.

Question 23

What group was the target of nineteenth-century industrialists’ use of predatory pricing?

Answer 23

Competitors
→ To encourage customers to switch companies, producers slashed prices in a particular market below productions costs, hoping to drive independent distributors to the wall. Once they had destroyed their competitors, they could raise prices again.

Question 24

Refer to the map Sources of European Immigration to the United States, 1871–1910

to answer the following question. Click the image to view full-size.

Based on the map, how did immigration shift from the first period, 1871–1880, to the second period, 1901–1910?

Answer 24

The primary source of immigration shifted to the south and east of Europe.
→ The main sources of immigration in the latter period were Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, all south and east of previous main sources of immigrants.

Question 25

Terence Powderly led which organization in the 1880s?

Answer 25

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Knights of Labor
→ Terence V. Powderly was the leader of the Knights of Labor during the organization’s height in the 1880s.

Question 26

Terence Powderly led which organization in the 1880s?

Answer 26

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Knights of Labor
→ Terence V. Powderly was the leader of the Knights of Labor during the organization’s height in the 1880s.

Question 27

What new figure appeared in the workplace in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 27

Middle manager
→ As the managerial revolution unfolded, the headquarters of major corporations began to house departments supervised by middle managers, something not seen before in American industry. Middle managers took on entirely new tasks, directing the flow of goods, labor, and information throughout the enterprise.

Question 28

What new figure appeared in the workplace in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 28

Middle manager
→ As the managerial revolution unfolded, the headquarters of major corporations began to house departments supervised by middle managers, something not seen before in American industry. Middle managers took on entirely new tasks, directing the flow of goods, labor, and information throughout the enterprise.

Question 29

Most of the immigrants without industrial skills who flooded into American factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from which geographical region?

Answer 29

Southern and eastern Europe
→ Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (Italians and Slavs) were largely peasants, displaced by the breakdown of the traditional rural economies of their native countries. They better filled the need for unskilled factory work than did immigrants from northern Europe, many of whom brought a craft or trade with them.

Question 30

The Knights of Labor excluded which ethnic group of workers in the nineteenth century?

Answer 30

Chinese
→ Although the Knights excluded the Chinese because of white Pacific coast antipathy to Chinese labor competition, they included Germans, English, and black workers within the decentralized labor movement in the 1880s.

Question 31

John D. Rockefeller pioneered a business strategy that became known by what name?

Answer 31

Horizontal integration
→ Rockefeller pioneered the strategy that became known as horizontal integration. He pressured competitors through predatory pricing, but when he had driven them to failure, he invited rivals to merge their companies into his conglomerate. Most accepted the offer, often because they had no choice.

Question 32

The gold rush in which state brought thousands of Chinese to the United States in the 1840s?

Answer 32

Report this questionGreat job! The correct answer is
California
→ The California gold rush brought thousands of Chinese to the United States in the 1850s.

Question 33

Why did farmers object to the high tariff policies of the 1870s and 1880s?

Answer 33

They suggested the tariffs increased prices on manufactured goods but failed to protect export crops.
→ High tariffs raised the prices on imported goods in order to protect domestic manufacturing in the United States. Farmers suggested that American tariff policies forced rural families to pay too much for basic necessities, while failing to protect the prices of America’s great export crops, cotton and wheat.

Question 34

What prevented most married women from finding work in factories or as secretaries in the late 1800s and early 1900s?

Answer 34

Day care was not available.
→ Married women had to find ways to tend to the children as well as make additional income. They found such opportunities by taking in laundry, by housing boarders in the family home, or by doing piecework.

Question 35

Which statement characterizes the larger historical significance of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882?

Answer 35

It provided a model for future exclusionary immigration policies.
→ The Chinese Exclusion Act created the legal foundations on which exclusionary immigration policies would be built after the 1920s, which placed severe restrictions on European immigration as well as Asian migrants.

Question 36

By 1890, as a result of Greenback movement, twenty-nine states had passed laws to regulate what industry?

Answer 36

Railroad
→ By the early 1880s, twenty-nine states had created railroad commissions to supervise railroad rates and policies; others appointed commissions to regulate insurance and utility companies. These regulatory efforts were not always effective, but they were important starting points for reform.

Question 37

Which cattle dealer built a meatpacking company based on vertical integration in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 37

Gustavus F. Swift
→ Gustavus F. Swift was a cattle dealer in Chicago who applied the assembly line to meatpacking and had engineers who invented the refrigerator car. These innovations allowed him to take advantage of the extensive infrastructure of railroad lines and expand his perishable meatpacking business to a national scale.

Question 38

In an era of cheap and increasingly rapid travel by steamship, many immigrants came to the United States as

Answer 38

sojourners.

→ These European immigrants expected to work and save for a few years and then head home.

Question 39

How did the federal government respond to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877?

Answer 39

By creating the National Guard
→ In the aftermath of the strike, the U.S. government created the National Guard, which was not intended to protect Americans against foreign invasion but to enforce order at home.

Question 40

Child laborers were most commonly employed in coal mines and which other American industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Answer 40

Textiles
→ Child labor was most widespread in the South where children were employed—often along with the rest of their families—in textile mills. Children worked in northern textile mills in this period as well.

Question 41

What did Andrew Carnegie, Gustavus Swift, and John D. Rockefeller all have in common?

Answer 41

They succeeded through vertical integration.
→ Carnegie, Swift, and Rockefeller controlled production and sales all the way from the raw material to the final product. All three sought to exercise control over their marketing and distribution, and all three sought to avoid the dips of the economy’s boom-and-bust cycles.

Question 42

Why did so many Chinese men on the Pacific coast decide to open restaurants or operate laundries?

Answer 42

Due to intense hostility in the region, these were the few niches open to them.
→ The Chinese confronted far more intense hostility in the form of abysmal pay and threats from coworkers, leading many of them to withdraw to the only niches open to them—restaurants and laundries.

Question 43

Refer to the image Marianna Mine Disaster

to answer the following question. Click the image to view full-size.

This photograph shows the residents of an immigrant working-class community in Marianna, Pennsylvania, observing the passage of a horse-drawn wagon carrying the bodies of some of the 158 miners killed in an explosion in the local coal mine in November of 1908. What does the image suggest about the impact of large-scale industrialization on the experiences of working people and communities around the turn of the nineteenth century?

Answer 43

Industrialization frequently exacted a high cost on individual workers, their families, and their communities.
→ This photograph illustrates the fact that industrialization led to the deaths of many workers, and that it caused considerable suffering among the people who lived with and near them. It demonstrates the human devastation sometimes wrought by industrial disasters.

Question 44

Refer to the image Child Labor

to answer the following question. Click the image to view full-size.

This photograph, taken in a glass factory at midnight, was produced by the Progressive reformer Lewis Hine. What was Hine’s likely attitude about the subject of the image?

Answer 44

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Industrial work is dirty, dangerous, exploitative, and harmful for children.
→ Hine and his Progressive colleagues opposed child labor. This photograph, taken for the National Child Labor Committee, aimed to show the dangers and exploitation endured by working children.
You’re more than three quarters of the way done with the activity. Almost there!

Question 45

The “cooperative commonwealth” was the ideal advocated by which nineteenth-century labor organization?

Answer 45

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Knights of Labor
→ The “cooperative commonwealth” was the ideal of the labor organization called the Knights of Labor.

Question 46

Refer to the map Sources of European Immigration to the United States, 1871–1910

to answer the following question. Click the image to view full-size.

Based on the map and what you know from prior reading, why did Americans refer to the immigration of the period from 1871 to 1910 as the “new” immigration?

Answer 46

The main sources of immigration shifted during this period.
→ Earlier in the nineteenth century, the main sources of immigration were the British Isles and Germany. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the chief sources were eastern and southern Europe.

Question 47

In the 1890s, few women in the United States worked in what occupations?

Answer 47

Skilled trades
→ The sex typing of occupations was a complicated phenomenon, but women were generally excluded from traditionally higher-paid skilled trades.

Question 48

What factor pushed increasing numbers of people to emigrate from Europe in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 48

The commercialization of agriculture
→ The commercialization of agriculture cheapened the price of major crops such as wheat or corn in world markets, making peasant economies in Eastern Europe, Italy, and other regions uncompetitive. Millions of displaced rural people ended up searching for alternatives, with many choosing to emigrate to South America and the United States.

Question 49

On which factor did American economic growth in the late 1800s depend?

Answer 49

A rapidly growing population
→ Economic growth in the United States depended on America’s large and rapidly growing population, which provided both a workforce and consumers, as well as its expansion into the West and its integrated national marketplace.

Question 50

Which labor organization was formed in the late nineteenth century by craft workers and organized along occupational lines?

Answer 50

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The American Federation of Labor
→ The American Federation of Labor was formed by craft workers organized along occupational lines.

Question 51

What selling strategy did Montgomery Ward and Sears use to reach rural customers in the late nineteenth century?

Answer 51

Mail-order catalogs
→ While department stores became urban fixtures, Montgomery Ward and Sears built mail-order empires. Rural families from Vermont to California pored over the companies’ annual catalogs, making wish lists of tools, clothes, furniture, and toys.

Question 52

After the Civil War, the United States signed the Burlingame Treaty with which country to control emigration from that country?

Answer 52

China
→ After the Civil War, the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China opened the way for increasing numbers of Chinese to emigrate to the United States.

Question 53

How did Asian immigrants fare in the nineteenth-century United States as compared to European immigrants in the same period?

Answer 53

Asian immigrants generally faced harsher treatment in the United States than Europeans.
→ Asian immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century faced even harsher treatment than European newcomers. Chinese immigrants in California in particular faced a rising tide of racism that led to threats, violence, and, ultimately, legal exclusion.